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A small château and a giant telescope

Camping fatigue is setting in, I can feel it. The rules are slipping. Yesterday I ate a meal with broccoli in and I’m not sure how many more rounds of Junior Monopoly I can take.

The weather has turned a bit. Intermittent torrential rain with dazzling hot sun has meant that we’ve done a few more trips. Here are the highlights…..

Château de la Ferté St-Aubin

You can’t come to France and not take in a chateau or two. A castle has stood in this spot since the11th century and has had bits added on ever since.

The entrance fee seems a bit steep until you read that it only covers the cost of five new roof slates. 400,000 have been replaced so far with many more to go.

The rooms in the castle are suitably impressive and furnished in an 18th century style. For children (or childish adults….) there are loads of different parlour games to try.

I took this opportunity to try and teach SC to play chess. With my chess skills she was a worthy opponent until she had a total meltdown claiming I had moved my king two spaces….. (I hadn’t, I swear!!). I blame a lack of lunch so we headed to the park adjoining the castle.

We spent the afternoon in the “Parcours des poisons” which is a terrific treasure hunt style game in the grounds of the castle.

As “Madeleine d’Egennes” you have to follow clues through the woods, collect the names of poisonous plants, traverse obstacles and solve riddles in order to find the witch La Voisin to assist you to poison your husband.

Completing the barefoot section of the hunt….

Now I’ve written that down it doesn’t sound very suitable but it was really good fun and the weather was lovely. If you return to the apothecary with all the clues completed they give you a vial of “poison” which has been a highlight of the trip for SC 😀

Pôle des Etoiles

The weather was due to be awful on Tuesday so we headed to this space research centre and planetarium in Nançay.

It’s pleasantly creepy in a vast, middle-of-nowhere space research centre Dr Who-y kind of way. The English commentary is not for beginners: “The radiographic heliotrope was installed in a decametric quandrant in 1958….” but the exhibition was interesting and had enough buttons to keep SC mainly happy until her end goal – the gift shop.

You can walk out from the car park to see the awesome radio telescope which monitors the activity of the sun.

It’s 40m high – Scott & SC for scale!

As always there are loads of other enticing things to see and do in the region, there’ll never be quite enough time.

We’d like to come back…but there’s so many other places to go! Soon we’ll be heading back to Greenwich but we’ve already got a couple of shorter trips in the diary.